Indeed, one of the most successful tricks of Tumblr’s old snowflakes has been infiltrating liberal media outlets and using their newfound influence to force social media platforms to become more like Tumblr and to ban anyone who could act as a countervailing influence. The result is that, in many ways, we all live on Tumblr circa 2014 now. And make no mistake, this is only a result of the media’s thumb resting on the scale. Early skirmishes between Tumblr and 4chan, when the two were on an equal footing, were brutally one-sided. Relational aggression is no match for gleeful, real aggression in an open fight, but it is far better at winning political allies.
But let us not lose sight of the real issue here: namely, that today’s wokeness began someplace, and that it is more about enforcing the norms of that place, and the hierarchies of power in that place, than it is about really reforming anything.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/04/from-what-lab-did-cancel-culture-leak/
First, Tumblr became known as a site that was most enthusiastically embraced by teenage girls. In fact, equal percentages of men and women use Tumblr in the United States as of last year, but the site’s culture arguably privileges traditionally feminine traits over male ones.
The “teenage” part, by contrast, was inarguable in the site’s early years. The site’s users skew disproportionately toward young Millennials, with a full 69 percent of its users coming from the Millennial generation, most of whom were in high school or college at the time when Tumblr’s popularity started to explode (around May 2011, the site had 5 billion posts, which ballooned to 166 billion by 2018). This teenage and feminine culture was prone, as teenage girls are generally, to huge amounts of relational aggression—i.e., attacking people through their friends and communities, rather than directly.
Second, as established above, Tumblr was a haven for budding artists in fan communities. While you’d think this would be a welcoming environment due to its non-monetizable interests, the reality of jockeying for status within fan communities can reach levels of brutality and absurdity commensurate with the professional art world. This was true even before Tumblr, as one can easily discover by looking at adult Harry Potter fanfiction communities from the early 2000s, or more specifically, the infamous case of a user called MsScribe.